Stephen Kinzer on the History of BP/British Petroleum and Its Role in the1953 Iran Coup

Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Rootsof Middle East Terror, looks at the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s role in the1953 CIA coup against Iran’s popular progressive prime minister, MohammadMosaddegh. [includes rush transcript]

Guest:

Stephen Kinzer, former New York Times reporter. He is author of All the Shah’sMen: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. His latest bookis Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America’s Future.

Rush Transcript

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AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to America’s role in a changing Middle East. Israelhas set up an internal inquiry into its deadly attack last month on theGaza-bound flotilla of humanitarian aid ships. Nine Turkish citizens, onewho also was a US citizen, were killed when Israeli commandos attacked aship in international waters last month. Israel rejected a UN proposal foran international probe into the incident but has agreed to include twoforeign non-voting observers in its own inquiry.

The United States has hailed the decision as, quote, "an important stepforward." But Turkey’s foreign minister said, quote, "We have no trust atall that Israel, a country that has carried out such an attack on a civilianconvoy in international waters, will conduct an impartial investigation."Turkish-Israeli relations appear to be at an all-time low following theflotilla attack.

Meanwhile, Turkey, along with Brazil, negotiated a nuclear fuel swapagreement with Iran and then voted against a UN Security Council resolutionlast week that imposed another round of sanctions on Iran.

Well, award-winning journalist and bestselling author Stephen Kinzer is outwith a new book that looks back into history to make some sense of theseshifting alliances in the Middle East and to chart a new vision for USforeign policy in the region. The former New York Times correspondent is theauthor of a number of books, including All the Shah’s Men: An American Coupand the Roots of Middle East Terror and Overthrow: America’s Century ofRegime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. His latest book, out this week, is calledReset: Iran, Turkey, and America’s Future. Stephen Kinzer joins me now fromWashington, DC.

Welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us, Stephen.

STEPHEN KINZER: Great to be with you again, Amy. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Actually, I want to start where you—descriptions and analysisyou gave in your previous books, which you continue in Reset, and it has todo with BP. Before we get to Turkey and Iran and Israel currently, I wantedto go back in time. President Obama has gone down to Mississippi, and he’sgoing to be in the Gulf Coast for a few days. But there’s very littlediscussed about BP’s history, and I’m wondering if you could start with usthere.

STEPHEN KINZER: The history of the company we now call BP over the lasthundred years has really traced the arc of global transnational capitalism.This company began as a kind of a wildcatting operation in Iran back in thefirst decade of the twentieth century. It was very entrepreneurial andrisk-taking, and they had a bunch of geologists running around in these veryforbidding steppes and deserts, and finally they struck what was thegreatest find up to that time in the history of the oil industry. They werethe ones who discovered that Iran was sitting on an ocean of oil. And thenthey decided they would take it. Under a corrupt deal that they had struckwith a few representatives of the old declining Iranian monarchy, all ofwhom had been paid off by the company, this concession, which later becameknown as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, guaranteed itself, or won the rightto own, all of Iran’s oil. So, nobody in Iran had any right to drill for oilor extract oil or sell oil.

Then, soon after that find was made, the British government decided to buythe company. So the Parliament passed a law and bought 51 percent of thatcompany. And all during the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s, the entire standardof living that people in England enjoyed was supported by oil from Iran. Allthe trucks and jeeps in Britain were being run on Iranian oil. Factories allover Britain were being funded by oil from Iran. The Royal Navy, whichprojected British power all over the world, was run 100 percent on oil fromIran. So that became a fundamental foundation of British life.

And then, after World War II, when the winds of nationalism andanti-colonialism were blowing throughout the developing world, Iraniansdeveloped this idea: we’ve got to take our oil back. And that was thegeneral—the kind of national passion that brought to power MohammadMosaddegh, who was the most prominent figure in the democratic period ofIran during the late '40s and early ’50s. It was Mosaddegh's desire,supported by a unanimous vote of the democratically elected parliament ofIran, to nationalize what was then the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Theycarried out the nationalization.

The British and their partners in the United States fiercely resisted this.And when they were unable to prevent it from happening, they organized theoverthrow of Mosaddegh in 1953. So that overthrow not only produced the endof the Mosaddegh government, but the end of democracy in Iran, and that setoff all these other following consequences. The Shah ruled for twenty-fiveyears with increasing repression. His rule produced the explosion of thelate '70s that produced the Islamic regime. So, it was to protect theinterests of the oil company we now know as BP that the CIA and the BritishSecret Service joined together to overthrow the democratic government inIran and produce all the consequences we've seen in Iran over the lasthalf-century.

AMY GOODMAN: And that involved both Dulles brothers—people often fly intoDulles Airport—John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and also Teddy Roosevelt’sgrandson.

STEPHEN KINZER: Yeah, history is kind of winking at us from that episode. It’squite an interesting quirk that Theodore Roosevelt, who essentially broughtthe United States into the regime change era around the very beginning ofthe twentieth century, wound up having a grandson who began the modern ageof intervention. Bear in mind that Iran was the first country where the CIAwent in to overthrow a government. When Teddy Roosevelt was overthrowinggovernments, there was no CIA. So each of them opened a chapter in thehistory of American interventionism.

AMY GOODMAN: And why—before we move forward now, why did the US intervene onbehalf of a British company, what later became British Petroleum, or BP?

STEPHEN KINZER: There were several reasons for it. Part of it had to do withthe desire for transatlantic solidarity. But I really think there were twokey reasons. One was that the Americans persuaded themselves that they hadto fight communism somewhere in the world. That was the idea with whichDulles and Eisenhower came into power in 1953, that they would no longerstick with the strategy of containment of communism, but they were going toa new strategy of rollback. But once they got into power, they werethinking, "How are we going to roll back communism? We can’t invade theSoviet Union. We’re not going to bomb China."

And here is where the other piece came in. The British were very eager tooverthrow Mosaddegh in order to get back their oil company. But when theypresented the plan to Dulles and Eisenhower, the agent who they sent toWashington, who has later written his memoirs, did something very clever. Hedecided it’s not going to work if I tell the Americans, "Please overthrowMosaddegh so we can have our oil company back." The Americans won’t respondto that. They won’t care enough. They’ll be afraid of the precedent of agovernment taking over a corporation that produces a resource in a poorcountry. That’s a bad precedent for John Foster Dulles and Americans, justas much as it is for the British. But what the Americans are reallyconcerned about at this moment in the early '50s is communism, so let's tellthem that Mosaddegh is leading Iran toward communism. Now, Mosaddegh was anelderly aristocrat who despised all socialist and Marxist ideas, but thatwas just a detail. He was able to be portrayed as a person who was weakenough so that later on his fall might produce an attempt by communists totake over in Iran.

So it was this combination of wanting to make sure that the example was notgiven in the world that nationalist governments could just nationalizecompanies owned by rich countries, and secondly, anybody who could come intothe American scope as being possibly not even sympathetic to communism, butcreating a situation in which, after he was gone, there might be instabilitythat could lead to a communist government, would wind up being a target ofthe US.

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British Petroleum is the UK’s largest corporation. It is among the largestprivate-sector energy corporations in the world. It is a verticallyintegrated cartel that operates oil and natural-gas exploration, marketing,and distribution all over the globe.

BP, however, goes beyond petroleum, indeed, beyond business. The mess wehave today in the Gulf of Mexico is not the first time BP has committedcrimes against the environment and against people. This is a proverbial dropin the bucket for BP. This outfit has been cheating humanity since itsinception.

Many people do not know that BP was born, named after, and committed manycrimes against the people of Iran. For nearly 80 years, it seized the wealthof that nation, interfered in its politics, and destroyed its future.

The history of crude-oil exploration and production in the Middle East beganwith William Knox D’Arcy (1849-1917), a British subject living in Australiawho became very rich very quickly—twice. D’Arcy, a lawyer, invested in goldmines in Rockhampton, Queensland. After becoming a millionaire by the end of19th century, he and his family returned to England.

In 1901, D’Arcy obtained a concession from the government of Iran to drillfor mineral resources, with the exception of the five northern provinces theRussians wanted. This concession, called the “Green Document,” was writtenon a page of green paper signed by the Shahanshah, king of kings, of Iran. D’Arcywas to pay the government of Iran £20,000 in cash and £20,000 in stock inthe proposed operation, plus a royalty of 16% of net profits from allenterprises formed under the agreement.

D’Arcy founded the First Exploration Company in 1903. He never set foot onthe land that made him a wealthy man. D’Arcy conducted business throughrepresentatives and later through the UK government. He hired G. B.Reynolds, an experienced geologist-engineer, to oversee the drilling.Reynolds had worked in India and been drilling in Sumatra.

Reynolds had visited Baghdad frequently and had paid close attention tolocal legends, especially the stories about Zoroastrian temples built oneternal fire and tar pits in southwestern Iran. He hired scouts from localnomadic tribes. These were akin to Native Americans guiding Ponce de Leon tothe Fountain of Youth.

He had two areas in mind. The very first attempt at drilling in westernIran, in Qaser Shirin, near the border with the Ottoman Empire, wasdisappointing. A third well was drilled near Masjid Sulaiman, 80 milesnortheast of Ahvaz, the capital of Khuzestan province. There was no oil hereeither.

D’Arcy had spent more than £225,000 to no avail and was ready to sell hisprecious Green Document. He mortgaged his remaining gold holdings but wasstill running out of money. D’Arcy telegraphed Reynolds and told him toclose down the operation.

But Reynolds was sure he would find oil. He telegraphed back and asked forwritten confirmation to be sent by mail. While waiting for the mail, whichnormally took two weeks, he and his scouts followed their noses day andnight, searching for that rotten-egg smell. Reynolds ordered drilling for afourth well where he had found traces from a natural seepage in the samevicinity as the third.

This one was a gusher. The crude shot 50 feet over the derrick from a wellthat was 1,180 feet deep. On May 26, 1908, the most significant chapter inthe history of the Middle East—if not the whole of mankind—opened.

By its 100th anniversary, this well had produced more than one billionbarrels of light crude oil. Reynolds had struck one of the world’s richestoil fields on the edge of the Persian Gulf basin. With 314 wells, the MasjidSulaiman field was still producing about 7,000 barrels of oil per day in theearly 1980s. And this was only the first of many productive Persian Gulfreservoirs.

In 1909, D’Arcy formed the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC). Britain’s FirstLord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, had been following the progress ofthe burgeoning petroleum industry because he was thinking of converting theBritish navy’s ships from coal to oil, which he implemented in 1911. Inorder to protect its supplies of this now-crucial military resource, theBritish government became part owner of APOC in 1914, acquiring 50 percentof the voting stock, reimbursing all of D’Arcy’s expenditures, and grantinghim £900,000 worth of shares. D’Arcy remained a director until his death in2000. In 1923, the company secretly paid £5,000 to Churchill to lobby the UKgovernment to grant APOC a monopoly on Iranian oil resources (Myers 2009).

The rush was on. Western oil companies eventually attained total controlover the middle-eastern oil industry. These companies often became de factorulers of these semi-colonial territories. All aspects of exploration,production, refining, and marketing were controlled by these multinationalcorporations. The owners not only discouraged but prevented nativepopulations from obtaining the skills and education to manage their ownresources, and workers were treated no better than slaves.

In 1935, the Iranian government sent a memorandum to all foreign embassiesin Tehran to address the country by its correct name: Iran—not Persia.Persia, or Pars, is only one of 30 provinces in Iran; Greek historiansmistakenly assumed that all people in Iran were Persians, and the Britishand others kept repeating this mistake (Kamiar 2007). APOC was forced tochange its name to Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC).

Oil concessions generally covered very large areas and were for longdurations. They paid a small, fixed, non-negotiable royalty. Until 1953,AIOC was paying Iran a 16% royalty. The government of Iran was not evenallowed to check AIOC’s records.

More importantly, these oil imperialists were supported by the full militarymight of their respective governments. Iran’s shah, who was installed by theAllies in 1941, headed a corrupt dictatorship. There is no telling what orhow much he stole from his people. With the help of these corrupt shahs,first backed by the British then by the US, AIOC appropriated the lion’sshare of Iran’s wealth.

By the post-WWII era and the beginning of decolonization, educated people inIran realized the country was in effect occupied and controlled by AIOC.They’d had enough. Coinciding with the growth of a new nationalist fervor inthe region, the shah was forced aside, remaining primarily as a figurehead,and a new prime minister, Mohammad Mossadeq, was elected in 1951. Mossadeq,with the approval of Majlis (the Iranian parliament), nationalized Iran’soil industry. The British government contested the nationalization at theInternational Court of Law, but its complaint was dismissed.

The British had, in effect, been kicked out of Iran.

AIOC responded with a boycott of Iranian oil, but that was not enough tobring the country to its knees. The British then approached Washington forhelp. Nothing much developed during the remainder of the Truman presidency,but the incoming president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was a very close friendand ally of Churchill’s and did not ignore his comrade’s pleas forassistance.

In 1953, the year Eisenhower took office, the CIA went into action, inpartnership with the British. Eisenhower approved the plan, called OperationAjax, of instigating a counter-coup designed to return the shah to totalpower. The director of the operation was Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson,Kermit Roosevelt, who headed the CIA’s Middle East division. The CIA paidout $1 million to hire demonstrators—mostly gang members, prostitutes, drugaddicts, and thugs (Gelvin, 2005, p. 279; Fayazmanesh, 2003, p.4). This sametactic had been used successfully in Italy in 1948 to prevent the communistsfrom winning the elections. Operation Ajax, mostly planned by Donald N.Wilbur, an architecture expert, was also supported by few ayatollahs,powerful landlords, and big merchants. The riots and chaos that ensued didthe trick, and Mossadeq was forced to resign. (See Alexander Cockburn's TheCrude Truth.)

When the shah triumphantly returned to Tehran on August 19, he personallyexpressed his gratitude to his savior, Kermit Roosevelt, for putting himback on his Peacock Throne. Upon returning to the US, Roosevelt accepted ajob with Gulf Oil. He remained in demand as a consultant and liaison betweenAmerican oil companies and Middle Eastern governments.

The shah’s return opened a reign of terror, funded by the US, in Iran.Mossadeq was found guilty of treason, spent three years in solitaryconfinement, and was put under house arrest until his death in 1967. Themajority of his supporters, however, were turned over to firing squads.Mossadeq’s foreign minister, Hossein Fatemi, was taken from a hospital to beexecuted.

In return for US help, AIOC agreed to share its Iranian concession with USoil companies. American victory in Iran resulted a newly formed oilconsortium, expansion of the right of extraterritoriality (meaning US and UKnationals could not be tried in Iranian courts), and the establishment ofSAVAK, the shah’s secret police. SAVAK was created in 1957 with CIAassistance and US tax dollars. Its primary mission was to eliminate threatsto the shah. Its tactics included censorship, “disappearances” ofdissidents, torture, and execution.

The shah showed his gratitude to US foreign-policy makers. During the warsof 1967 and 1973 between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the shah providedcheap fuel for the Israeli war machine even as Arab members of OPECdecreased oil production and created an oil embargo directed at the westernnations, causing oil prices to quadruple in two months. By 1975, as theworld’s second-largest oil producer (after Saudi Arabia), Iran was earningnearly $20 million per hour. Much of this money went to the US as Iranbecame the largest purchaser of American weapons.

In 1954, AIOC changed its name to British Petroleum. In 1959, BP expandedbeyond the Middle East to Alaska, and in 1965 it was the first company tostrike oil in the North Sea. Today, the oil company that began in Iran hasgone global. It has oil wells and gas stations on all continents.

At $1 million, the counter-coup in Iran seemed like a bargain for the US.But was it? Drawing a straight line from the overthrow of Mossadeq’sgovernment in 1953 to the Iranian revolution of 1979—and perhaps to theevents of September 11, 2001—we begin to see Operation Ajax’s ultimate costin terms of money and lives. From 1953 to 1979, Iran was a BP prison,polluted and poor, run with an iron fist by the company and its puppet, theshah.

Now it is drilling offshore near the US in the Gulf of Mexico. ManyAmericans in the region are beginning to feel the pain and outrage Iraniansendured for 70 years—getting a small taste of how BP goes Beyond Politics.

Dr. M. Kamiar is a professor of geography at Florida State College. WithProfessor Stanley D. Brunn, he is editing Native World Geography. Eachchapter on a region in this book is going to be written by a geographer witha doctoral degree from that region. He can be reached at mkamiar@fscj.edu.

Big Oil’s Predations are not Your FaultPosted on June 15, 2010 by Juan

No, the BP oil volcano in the Gulf of Mexico is not your fault, despite whatmany pundits will tell you. Back in the 1960s when the environmentalmovement got going, major US corporations responsible for much of the nation’spollution decided to fight it by paying for television advertising thaturged individuals not to litter, thus implying that pollution is produced byanarchic individuals rather than by organized businesses. It was a crockthen and it is a crock now.

You did not demand that BP consistently cut safety corners more than anyother petroleum company, thus resulting in the Deepwater Horizon calamity,which could end up costing the economy of the Gulf of Mexico literallyhundreds of billions of dollars this year.

How much the Gulf oil catastrophe is not your fault can more clearly be seenif we consider the ways in which a BP refinery in Indiana is threatening theGreat Lakes with excess pollution.

The BP refinery received permission from the Indiana legislature to increaseits ammonia and silt (infested with toxic heavy metals) output into theLakes. The increased pollution was part of an expansion of the refinery toallow it to process Canadian tar sands. In addition, BP has illegally spewedextra benzene into the lakes (benzene is a known cause of leukemia) and hasalso repeatedly broken the law with regard to air pollution standards.

You did not ask BP to dump extra benzene illegally into Lake Michigan (thelakes are connected). You did not agitate in Indianapolis to permit therefinery to expand to handle tar sand, which is all by itself an ecologicalcatastrophe. You did not demand that more ammonia and toxic metals be dumpedinto the lakes. None of these crimes against nature was your individualresponsibility.

Rather, the Indiana legislature passed these laws because of ‘legislativecapture.’ That phenomenon occurs when an industry that is supposed to beregulated by a legislature instead pays so much for political campaigns thatit captures the members and proves able to write the legislation affectingits interests. Legislative capture explains almost everything that is wrongwith America today, from the wars to the difficulty in expanding healthcare, and from inaction on climate change to the high price of prescriptiondrugs.

Legislative capture is not your fault.

In fact, it is mostly the fault of Ronald Reagan, who so lowered taxes onthe rich that he allowed them to capture almost all the country’s increasedwealth since the 1980s, depriving ordinary Americans of any real increase inthe standard of living. Since our filthy rich quadrupled their wealth inrecent decades but most of you don’t have 4 times as much money in the bankas you used to, you are competing less and less well with the rich foraccess to and influence with your elected representatives.

This year a man worth $9 billion died and passed it on to his childrenwithout paying any estate tax at all, thanks to the Republican Party. Thissituation is creating a permanent aristocracy of the sort that in theeighteenth century ruled the 13 colonies in the East and the northernterritories of the Spanish Empire in the West, all of which now havecongealed into the United States. One of the points of the AmericanRevolution from the point of view of Thomas Jefferson was to make thecountry safe for middling, yeoman farmers and to prevent the distantcolonial aristocracy from taxing us without representation.

Our new business aristocracy, whether Big Oil or Big Banking, taxes usindirectly by legislative capture, by arranging for bought-and-paid-forpoliticians to subsidize their industries with public tax monies. There isnothing wrong with being wealthy, and often the wealthy have made keycontributions to society. But let us face it. Business classes areinterested in short-term profit and seldom think in terms of long-termcost-benefit for society. Having a dynamic business class in a society canbe a plus if its focus on short-term gain for the company can be offset byother powerful forces in society– labor unions, NGOs, intellectuals andothers. But when the business classes get so they own nearly half theprivately held wealth, they can overwhelm everyone else and take society inself-destructive directions– as happened with the Iraq War, the economiccollapse in September of 2008 and with the oil rig collapse in April 2010.

And that is not your fault.

Now, part of what the pundits are saying when they say the Gulf oil gusheris your fault is that you like to drive your car inexpensively to work, andso you are part of a consumer market that motivates BP to drill. But it isgrossly unfair to blame you, the worker, for the difficulty of getting towork by much more efficient rail or for allegedly rejecting electricvehicles powered by .e.g. wind farms.

The US government gives and has for decades given massive hidden subsidiesto the petroleum industry that make gasoline seem far less expensive thanthan it is, and auto, cement and oil corporations successfully lobbied fortaxpayer subsidies for highway systems rather than for rail and publictransport.

You did not ask them to do that.

Joe Blumenauer notes:

‘Oil companies receive special deductions lowering their effective taxrate to about 11 percent, compared to 18 percent for non-oil industries.This has cost an estimated $200 billion since 1968 and, with soaringindustry profits in recent years, is growing at an ever-increasing rate. ‘

The cost of licenses for offshore drilling have been mysteriously slashed bythe Department of the Interior, a way of transferring your money to the oilcompanies and of actually promoting offshore drilling, with all itspotential to harm you environmentally and economically. Do you rememberlobbying the Mines and Minerals Service for that one?

Even the wars you are paying for in the Perso-Arabian Gulf and in CentralAsia, as well as the aid given Israel and Egypt, amounting altogether toover $100 billion a year, must be seen as a subsidy to big oil.

And then, the cost of water, soil and air pollution is not figured into theprice of a gallon of gasoline. It is charged to the taxpayer in variousways. And, global warming is also not figured into the cost of gasoline.

In fact, the various deep subsidies that you are involuntarily giving BigOil are being used in part to buy a propaganda campaign to convince you thatclimate change has been exaggerated and is nothing to worry about. Ironic,ain’t it?

But that is not your fault, either.

People keep saying that wind power is ‘just about’ competitive with oil andgas. But in fact if the true cost of oil and gas were properly calculated,and all the hidden subsidies were removed, wind would be revealed to be muchcheaper than these other power sources are. Even solar might make a goodshowing in that case. (Don’t bother complaining to me about the limits ofwind turbines and solar cells; they have those limits because not enoughresearch and development money has been thrown at them by the government andby government-engineered incentives to private business. A reader complainedthat the investment had not worked with regard to fusion but that is silly.Wind and solar are proven but infant technologies and Germany has alreadyshown that government support makes a big difference here.)

The subsidies for petroleum are unlikely to be lifted. This outcome is notbecause you will lobby congress and the senate to keep supporting big oilwith your tax dollars. It is because of legislative capture. Too manyelected representatives secretly run on the Big Oil Party ticket. (And no,it is not true that President Obama is more guilty of that than were hisopponents).

It would help if the US Supreme Court did not recognize corporations aspersons and did not confuse political campaign money with free speech, andif it would allow Germany’s practice of making campaign ads free. Then ourelected representatives would not have to spend all their time raising moneyfor television commercials from corporations in return for legislative quidpro quos. But the Court is appointed by the politicians who are victims oflegislative capture, and it therefore represents the interests of BigBusiness.

I don’t know how to turn this thing around. I don’t know how to get freecampaign commercials, or less money in politics, or stop legislative captureor halt the enthronement of the New American Business Aristocracy, with itsall too frequent focus on short-term profit over long-term public welfare. Idon’t know how to stop offshore drilling or wean us all off petroleum-fueledautomobiles (I know that such a weaning would in any case take decades–butwe haven’t even begun). Me, I ride my bike into work 9 months of the year.

I do know that many congressional Democrats see the current tragedy as aonce-in-a-century opportunity to reformulate energy policy away frompetroleum, and that they will need an outpouring of public support and ofpublic donations to pull that off.

If you don’t support them in this push to begin getting away fromhydrocarbons, then whatever follows– will be your fault.

Probably a lot of the anger towards BP is from the arrogance they've shown. The Chairman has now said he "cares for the small people". I suppose he's sorry for that now, but it really is the attitude these big companies seem to have.

On 60 MInutes last month, they interveiwed a survivor of the explosion who said there had been several warning signs of the rig malfunctioning before it blew up, but BP kept telling them to just keep drilling anyway.

Here's something someone sent to me a week ago in an email. It's a comical way to illustrate the incompetance of the big companies.

I wish there were more alternatives to our transportation here besides burning oil. I admit I love being able to get in my own car and take off anytime I want to, and I love driving. But I'd also love being able to get on a train and go to the places I want to go but there aren't many. We have Amtrack, but it's expensive. I looked up how much it would cost to visit my brother in Texas by train and it's about $200 round trip. Flying is OK, but I want to see scenary.

That is sad seeing what the Oil companies are doing to our beautiful Great Lakes too. I can remember the old Don't Litter commercials, but I always knew the big corperations were the most guilty, because I could see the results in our local river, which was green and red behind the steel mill. The river has been cleaned up very well the past few years, but sad to see the steel mills have gone out of buisness,which isn't good for the economy around here.

I'm glad Cleveland is going to be putting in wind turbines for electricity.

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/07/04 ... ax-breaks/I actually had this on here the other day, but took it down. It's about all the ways they can escape paying taxes by putting their money in banks outside the US. Over the years, I've heard people like Limbaugh complaining about how the rich pay such high taxes, which could be true, but then all the ones below the rich, are getting killed with taxes.